River Meets the Sea: A Novel

Written by Rachael Moorthy

Narrated by Braden Wright

A spellbinding, spirited tale of two men exploring masculinity, race, and belonging in a desperate search to feel at home in their own skins.

An enthralling nautical epic, River Meets the Sea traces the dual timelines of a white-passing Indigenous foster child in 1940s Vancouver and a teenage immigrant in the suburbs of Nanaimo in the 1970s.

A natural-born storyteller, Ronny is a left-handed "alley mutt" without a birth certificate who searches for his mother everywhere-most powerfully, he hears her voice in the surging Sto:lo River. Born in the middle of the ocean on a merchant ship departing Sri Lanka, Chandra is a Tamil boy with "skin like a charred eggplant" who finds his haven from the pressure to assimilate by swimming and surfing in the Salish Sea.

Moving gracefully between these parallel stories like a wave, the novel traces the seemingly separate lives of these sensitive young men and their everlasting connections to water. When their troubled paths inevitably cross, they form a sacred bond based on the mutual understanding of what it means to be othered, illuminating the interconnectedness of humanity and our innate relationship with the natural world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Feb 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350833188

Rachael Moorthy

RACHAEL MOORTHY is a writer of mixed heritage who is passionate about telling stories from the perspectives of melanated, diasporic, and displaced Indigenous people. She has a bachelor’s of writing from the University of Victoria and is pursuing a master’s at the University of Basel. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Far Horizons Award for Poetry, and her fiction has appeared in publications such as PRISM inter­national, SAD Magazine, and Revue Zinc. Born in Matsqui, British Columbia, Rachael lives in Switzerland.